Heat Vision Blog is reporting on the heels of the announcement that Martin Sheen is in final negotiations to portray Uncle Ben in the upcoming Spider-Man reboot, that Sally Field is in “early talks” to play Aunt May.

I know Swank-mo-tron and some of the other bots here are concerned this is going to be yet another origin story rehash and that we are going to have to once again “learn” how Peter Parker became Spider-Man. I’m hoping that the origin story will perhaps be shown in bits and pieces throughout the movie in the form of flash-backs, instead of just a straight retelling of the well-known story – but, who knows what Marc Webb has up his sleeves. I like the idea of a little bit “younger” Aunt May, and there’s little argument that Sally Field is a fine actress, so if this comes through I don’t expect to hear too much disappointment. Though, for some reason I have thought for a while now that Helen Mirren would make a good Aunt May . . .

Marc Webb’s Spider-Man film is set to start filming next month.

A new robot, Rassilatron, got a chance to see the Green Lantern trailer early and wanted to share his opinion of it with you. The tea leaves I’ve read seem to indicate that this trailer will be debuting on the new Harry Potter film.

So, I’ve always been the reluctant one to take surveys, especially those who promise virtual money. Imagine my surprise though, as I’m taking a movie survey and they ask me to watch this movie preview and give my opinions on it, and the first thing I see is the Green Lantern symbol! Being a huge GL fan, I nearly flew out of my seat as I began laughing excitedly. Well, more like Nelson from Simpsons “Ha Ha,” as I know no one has seen this publically yet mean I know, but I could not resist and it was quite unexpected. After watching this preview, my impatience for summer of 2011 just increased a hundred fold.

I have been waiting for a Green Lantern movie ever since special effects started using CG. I mean come on; GL is the perfect superhero movie for something like this. From what I can tell, it is not going to disappoint. There is one scene in the preview where Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) makes a giant fist and gives a mob of bad guys a giant right hook. Always a favorite construct, I do hope though we see more complex ones, like a giant f-16 surrounding Hal, always thought it was cool when he did it.

There have been rumors of this movie being like training day with Sinestro (Mark Strong) showing Hal the ropes. Strictly from this preview, I can not say if they are going to do this as I didn’t see one scene with Sinestro in it. I know he is cast and is in the posters, but strictly from the preview, they do not seem to be focusing on him to greatly. I can say the villain in this first one seems to Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard). Not a favorite villain of mine personally, he always creeped me out as the obsessed stalker, but he may work with the direction it looks like they are taking for a genesis story.

This is the one part which has me worried; they look like they are going to portray “The Man Without Fear” as a man who has to overcome fear. Now, I know they of late

have been pointing to the fact Hal does have fear he just has the ability to overcome it in the comics, but the one thing about Hal is he never really showed it. There is a conversation he has where he mentions what the ring said about being without fear, and the guy he’s talking to gives him a look and Hal says unsurely, “I know right?” All in all though, I can see how they can use Hector Hammond to have him overcome fear, I mean the guy gets into your head. I just really hope they do not focus too much on him overcoming fear, they need to stay true to Hal’s strong, confident persona.

This said, the chemistry between Hal and Carol Ferris (Blake Lively) seems really good, and the banter seems right on. One thing I have to say about Ryan Reynolds is he plays the cocky, playful romantic well, and seriously, who does not like Blake Lively? One reason I think they casted him in this role in the first place. When it comes to Hal’s love life, he has always seemed to have an air of “I’m Hal, I rock, you know it, let’s have some fun”. To quote Robin from “The Batman” cartoon after he found out his day job, “Even your secret identity is cool!” This is Hal Jordan in a nutshell. This of course translates into other aspects of how Hal deals with his new powers as well. There is one scene where he shows his friend how he changes costume and the conversation goes like this, “That’s cool!” “I know!” “So what do we do now” “Go fight some bad guys?” It is like what would happen if a ten year old, or a frat boy got powers.

All in all, I have to say , this is going to be a must see movie next summer. I know as for me I will be first in line to see it.

Lucasfilm has been kind enough to offer us this exclusive clip of next weeks episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, featuring fan favorite Quinlan Vos.

Tonight’s episode, 3.8, is a prequel to the season 1 finale, next week, featuring Quinlan, is a sequel.  I gather that Obi-Wan and Quinlan are on the hunt for Ziro the Hutt after Cad Bane breaks him out. Also, a big tip off is that the name of the episode is The Hunt For Ziro.

To my knowledge, this is also the first time we’ve seen Anakin’s original owner, Gardulla the Hutt in action.

Analyzing the scene further, the background has a lot of cool stuff to see, including Gammoreans and humanoid female dancers with Hutt headdresses. The extras on the show are getting filled out more and more to the point where it feels like we’re in Star Wars more and more. The ambience by music and lighting is getting better and better and this clip is a sterling example.

UPDATE: Some have pointed out that Gardulla the Hutt was killed in the EU.  8 years ago.  In a video game no one has ever heard of. (Bounty Hunter.  See?  You’d never heard of it either.)   It looks like a cool game, but seriously?  For one, Expanded Universe continuity wonks should get used to the fact that George Lucas is the one person completely willing and allowed to stomp all over the fan-fiction desert of the EU.  For two, you really took something that happened in a video game so seriously that you’re holding it sacred?  Things happen in video games all the time that have no bearing on the reality of a series.  Did it become canon that Luke Skywalker had to fight the Jawenko monster in the belly of the sandcrawler because that’s what happened in Super Star Wars?

No.  Please, don’t take it so seriously.  This clip is great and I’m glad at the opportunity to learn more about Anakin’s original owner on Clone Wars.  It will be interesting to see if Anakin actually interacts with Gardulla.

In any case, enjoy the clip:

“>Be sure to check out the clip of tonight’s episode, too.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Martin Sheen is in final negotiations to play Uncle Ben in the new Marc Webb Spider-Man picture.

Sheen will join a cast that includes Andrew Garfield as Parker, Emma Stone as love interest Gwen Stacy and Rhys Ifans as the movie’s unnamed villain.

The movie, under the direction of Marc Webb, is heading for a December start.

Half of this is terribly exciting for me, the other half is incredibly boring.

On the one hand: Martin Sheen is a tremendous actor and will add a gravitas to this film that would rival the weight Cliff Robertson brought in the Sam Raimi films.  His work has been consistently good and roles like Captain Queenan in The Departed make me completely sure he can pull this off.  Remember that scene in The Departed where he brings Leonardo DiCaprio into his kitchen and was all like, “Let’s get you supper.”?  There was a paternal warmth in that scene that was fantastic and will be great for Uncle Ben.

On the other hand: apparently we’re effing idiots and need another Spider-Man origin story, as though anyone in the galaxy doesn’t know how Peter got his powers and came to learn that with great power comes great responsibility.

Really?  Another one?

The Spider-Man movies were some of the highest grossing films of all time.  Why the hell do we need to see his origin again?  There’s nothing Marc Webb can add to it that would make me care anymore about the character.

On the third hand: Perhaps Webb will use Uncle Ben much the same way Raimi used him in Spider-Man 2.

We won’t know until we see it.

What do you guys think.  You think we need another origin story?  If you do, what do you think of Sheen in the role?

The Hollywood Reporter has broken the news that Johnny Depp’s next film (presumably after finishing the next installment of Pirates of the Caribbean) will be the Tim Burton re-imagining of the classic vampire soap opera “Dark Shadows”.

The reteaming of Burton and Depp has been more than three years in the making — Depp was obsessed with the series as a child — but the studio has now set an April start.

Depp will portray Barnabas Collins, a vampire living in a Maine manor who is searching for his lost love.

I watched some of this show as a kid and was never impressed.  My mom loved it, but that never held much water for me.  It was slow and dry.  I’m interested to see what Burton and Depp can bring to the table with it, though, to be honest.  This is like Twilight for grownups and (hopefully) smart people.  Even the bad soap opera version had a depth to it Twilight lacks.

On the other hand, I’m sort of yawning at the idea of more vampire fare.

What do you guys think?  Are we done with vampires?  Or is this exciting to you?

It’s time once again for another installment of The Big Movie Mouth Off, starring Jeff Vice from MSN and Jimmy Martin from SLUG Magazine (and both are regular panelists on The Geek Show Podcast)

You can friend the show on Facebook here.

These are available exclusively on Comcast in Utah.  Soon they’ll be available On Demand.  For now, they’re available nightly on Comcast Channel 6 at 11pm.  After their exclusive run there, they will be appearing on Big Shiny Robot! and across the Internet. (iTunes/podcast versions coming soon by popular demand.) They are produced and directed by Bryan Young (myself) and Elias Pate both from Big Shiny Robot! and ShineBox Media Productions.

Without further delay, let’s get to the reviews:

First up is “Never Let Me Go”

Bruce Willis’ graphic novel based shoot ’em up “RED”:

“The Tillman Story”:

Another documentary, “Waiting for Superman”

Finally, we have the latest Woody Allen film “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger”

Big Shiny Robot! has a weekly column in the Salt Lake City alt-weekly IN Magazine and every week we bring it to you on the site.

If you live in the greater Salt Lake area, you can pick up a copy of IN Magazine up from one of their ubiquitous newsstands, and we would highly suggest that you do.

You can read the online version of the story here.

Click on the image below to read the article as it appears in print:

And here are the pictures that accompanied the article, but they were cut for space:

It’s time again for Tag Team Thursday, where Clobber-Tron and Shaz-Bot take one of this week’s comics and share their opinions! This week the gruesome twosome take on:

THE MASSIVE 64 PAGE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #647

S-B: Amazing #647 is touted as the end of the Brand New Day storyline. To be honest, I thought that was just the name of the first arc after the status quo change and already considered it finished a long time ago.

C-T: Yes after the huge reboot that almost broke the Internet in 2008, I thought there’ve been a few different story arcs including ‘New Ways to Die’ and Grim Hunt, but apparently they’ve all been BND stories.

S-B: This issue does tie a bow on various goings on of the last 100 or so issues. There has a been a lot of stuff going on in the book, so if you haven’t been keeping up, many of the winks the writers give might be lost on you. Thankfully, if you’ve only been reading recent issues, this wraps up the “Osborn baby” storyline of the past few issues as well.

C-T: ‘Tie a bow’ is a great way to put it, I actually went back and read the first few issues penned by Dan Slott and this book feels more like a love letter to him than a wrap up issue. There are so many similarities between this issue and #547, from panel layouts to the car chase it’s worth it to go back and take a look. In fact if you want to have a lot of fun read this issue backwards Manga style and then read 547 forward to really catch it all.

S-B: In the main story, everyone’s getting together to throw Harry Osborn a going away party. Y’see, he’s going into hiding because the whole of Spidey’s Rogues’ Gallery was just on a manhunt for his ex-lover’s kid.

C-T: I was hoping we’d start out with a really fun beginning despite having to wrap up the “Origin of the species’ story arc, because it’s been a bit lackluster. Everyone having a party for Harry should be fun but this doesn’t play out that way at all. Aside from the Spider-mobile making and appearance and Spidey in an off the rack Halloween costume this didn’t feel Amazing, Spectacular or even Web of.

S-B: I don’t care who you are, if you have no love of the Spider-Mobile, well… Anyway, it turns out that Peter Parker’s old cop roommate Vin is getting out of stir on the same day. Shenanigans go in in the usual Spidey manner, where we have Peter having romance issues, angst-a-plenty and the ever looming shadow of  the Green Goblin manifesting in a somewhat interesting way.

C-T: No matter what kind of spin the put on re introducing the Green Goblin it’s going to seem trite compared the previous Lee/Ditko stories, so I don’t see how any appearance will be interesting.

S-B: To each his own. So in summary, I guess I would call this an adequate wrap up on the whole “Brand New Day” thing, as it nicely parallels with the beginning. Honestly though, I don’t feel that BND needed wrapping up. It isn’t like next issue Peter and MJ are going to be married again.

C-T: That’s a great point, I don’t see how BND can be over if it doesn’t even slightly change the status quo.

S-B: Of the other stories in the book, we get a Harry Osborn story taking place 5 minutes after the lead, a completely pointless vignette of an extremely minor character’s adventures through BND, an entertaining look at why J. Jonah Jameson may not be the best mayor NYC has ever had, a one page gag of JJJ: The Musical. Also included are a pretty good Flash Thompson story, a Norah Winters story (really?),  a preview of the next storyline and a BND-era cover gallery. The latter of which immediately reminded me how many needless variant covers are out there in the wild. I will admit I like the parody of the Obama cover featuring Nixon. I may have to track that one down.

C-T: And if you’re on the fence don’t forget This book is huge, three times what you usually get, so $4.99 is justifiable.

S-B: All in all, I would say if you’re already a fan of Spidey and have been following him, go ahead and pick up the book, all of the content is new, so you won’t feel like you’ve wasted the extra money the book costs. If you’re a casual Spider-phile, this issue won’t really do much for you.

We haven’t heard much about the details of the announced Thundercats animated reboot. But now an interview by MTV’s Splash Page from series producer Michael Jelenic gives us some new details.  Jelenic, who also has worked as producer on one of my favorite current animated shows, Batman: The Brave and The Bold, said of the direction of the art: “We have some great artists.  We’re using a very famous Japanese animation studio, Studio4C, which did ‘The Animatrix.’ They’re going to have their signature stuff on it. It’s going to be pretty epic.”

Pretty epic?  Thundercats?  Purr-fect. But, wait, who’s doing the art?

Studio 4°C (株式会社スタジオよんどしい Kabushiki-Gaisha Sutajio Yondo Shii according to wikipedia) has done a lot of stuff I think most geeks would have seen, including the “Kid’s Story” segment of The Animatrix (which you can watch from google free of charge here) and two segments of “>Batman: Gotham Knight which is really worth watching in its entirety, but their segments are especially good, blending good action and character and setting just the right mood.

But this is Thundercats we’re talking about?  Batman and The Matrix can exist in gritty, washed out worlds.  Do we really want Thundercats not in splendid color so we can see those awesome pastel jumpsuits everyone wore?  </sarcasm>  From Jelenic:

“I think when people see the final character designs, people will think it’s a different take, but it will feel very familiar to the old series.  The colors aren’t quite as bright as they were. I’s a little darker take, but you’ll recognize everybody.”

Everybody who?

Panthro, Tygra, Cheetara? “All those characters will still be in it” Jelenic promises — and Snarf.

“Everyone always wants to know about Snarf,” he laughed. “He will be in it, and he will not talk. Don’t worry.”

“He won’t be going, ‘Lion-O, why don’t you do this?'” said Jelenic, imitating the character’s familiar whine. “We just having him say, ‘Snarf! Snarf!’ That’s a way to get him in the show without annoying every single person who hates him. It’s funny, because people are always like, ‘I hate Snarf! Wait. you’re not going to put him in? That’s terrible!'”

No word on WilyKat and WilyKit, which is, in my mind, a good sign, as those are two characters we can do without.

But what about the whole “reimagining” thing? Jelenic agreed that the word “reimagining” could mean a lot of things, so he explained one specific change he’s looking to make with the new series.

“One thing is that I tried to simplify the mythology a little bit,” he said. “It’s a pretty complicated backstory that borrows from a lot of other sci-fi stuff, like Superman and Star Wars. In developing this, I wanted it to be a little more simple. In the other version, there’s something like three different planets involved, and they all converge onto one planet, and nobody’s really connected. I just wanted to bring that all together.”

That sounds good to me, as long as we keep the rogue’s gallery fairly consistent.  That means, to me at least, Mumm-Ra, Slithe, Jackalman, and Monkian, plus or minus a Vultureman, or some improved version of them if you please.  I always liked that the Mutants were the blunt object, while Mumm-Ra got to be puppet-master.

We’ll see Thundercats on CartoonNetwork sometime next year, most likely next Fall.  I can’t wait. It will hopefully replace the rather large hole that the loss of Batman: Brave and the Bold is causing me.

No word if Thundercats will have an all-singing episode starring Neil Patrick Harris yet.  Stay tuned.

This first appeared on Huffington Post here.

DC Comics, through their Vertigo imprint, has once again given us an incredible book, this time in the form of the autobiographical How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less by Sarah Glidden.

The entire situation in Israel/Palestine is a complicated one. I don’t think anyone on either side of the issue will argue that. There are so many shades of gray to the issue that you want to put on rose colored glasses just to add some color into things and try making sense of it. I had my feelings and my limited understanding of the issues and I must say they were all challenged by Glidden’s book.

The book revolves around Glidden’s decision to take “Birthright Israel” tour and all of the things she learns there. She leaves with an informed idea of what she thinks the situation is, but it’s always so much more hazy when you’re there.

Glidden takes us from her departure to her return in panel after gorgeous, water-colored panel and we get just as confused about how we should feel by the reality of the situation as she does.

This book is not pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. It’s not anti-Israel or anti-Palestine either, it’s pro-reality. And in reality, nothing is ever really in black and white. I enjoyed the fair, even handed nuance it took to bring us this book, and I think it should be required reading for anyone who waxes philosophical on the subject of Israel or anyone who wants to know more about the increasingly muddled situation abroad.

DC Comics has been kind enough to provide us an exclusive preview of the book below and I think you’ll agree with me when I say that it’s written in an insightful manner and drawn with an attention to detail you could only acquire by living through it.

It comes out November 9th, but you can preorder it here on Amazon.

Head to the Huffington Post for the rest of the preview!

Bryan Young is the editor of the geek news site Big Shiny Robot!